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4 (172) THE f
Family F
A LAYMAN'S SERMON.
BY VICE-PRESIDENT-ELECT THOMAS R. MARSHALL.
There is, 1 sometimes think, a weakening to
a greater or less degree in the spiritual power
of the church together with a lessening of the
faith and hopes of men. I think I know what
has produced it. From my viewpoint, Jesus
Christ was not a reformer in the usual and ordinary
acceptation of that term. He lived when
the greatest despotism that the world has ever
known ruled the habitable globe. Yet, the only
recorded statement of anything he said with
reference to the Roman Empire was, "Render
unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's and
unto God the things which are God's." Sla
very had reached the very depths of degradation
and yet this great apostle advised a runaway
slave to return to his master. The Christ
was not engaged in repealing bad laws nor in
providing criminal punishments for the violators
of good ones.
MORE THAN A REFORMER.
Jesus Christ was more than a reformer. He
was a regenerator. The church is to stand as
the representative of the Kingdom of God on
earth and "except ye be born again, ye cannot
enter into the Kingdom." He brooded over
Jerusalem as a hen broods over her chickens
and vet. he never strove to make bad Jerusalem
appear to be good Jerusalem. He was wiser,
because he was divine, than we are. He sought
to teach men that God was their Father; that
he had come to save them from their transgressions
and that no man could approximate unto
good citizenship or hope to enter into his Kingdom
unless he had an abiding faith in him as
the mediator and redeemer of mankind despite
the weakness, frailties, follies and sins of human
nature.
It may be that there is no lessening of faith
upon the part of the people but that it is only
a lessened knowledge. It is true that the average
knowledge among all the people with refer
ence to the vital principles of our religious
faith is not as great as it was in the days of our
fathers.
Have men in the mass any definite idea of
immortality and any certain longing therefor ?
Is not the whole future of myriads of men
vague, doubtful and uncertain! Do not hundreds
and thousands of men regard death as
the old infidel defined it?as a leap in the dark,
with this difference, perhaps, that the fear of
the infidel over the leap is eliminated?
PARENTAL NEGLIGENCE.
Busied by many things, intensely earnest in
the affairs of this world; pushing and jostling
to make money, not particularly for money's
sake but for the good and pleasure that may
be gotten out of it, too few parents now have
time to consider that their children are immortal
souls who must be taught the'way of
regeneration. As a result, family ties, so strong
in the past, are loosened in the present day;
parental responsibility rests not so heavily and
the average father and mother think they have
done well if they persuade the boy up to fourteen
and the girl up to sixteen to take a hop,
skip and jump through the Holy Scriptures as
disclosed in the Sunday-schools of today.
During four years of official life, scores of
sad-eyed mothers have found their way into my
presence begging for executive clemency for
wayward sons and daughters. It has rarely
happened that one of them has failed to say in
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'RE8B YTERIAN OF THE 8<
leadings
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the midst oi her sobs, ""What-have 1 done that
God should punish me so 1" and coward that 1
have been, 1 have never had the courage to say
to any one of these broken-hearted women what
ought to be said to every father and mother in
the land?"It is not what you did for which
God is punishing you; it is for what you did not
do that you are being punished.''
it will not do for us to assume in this land
of liberty that there is no such thing as authority.
iSooner or later, peaceably or forcibly,
all men lind themselves to be under authority.
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down lixed rules of life and teach the higher
law of giving in the home, then the school and
Sunday-school must endeavor to teach this
law, and if they fail, sooner or later, the strong
Hand of the state or the still stronger hand of
public condemnation reveals that none is above
law and authority.
HEALING THE HURT SLIGHTLY.
Let me ask, are not men more and more picking
out some particular evil of the day and devoting
their entire tune, energy and ability to
the enactment of some law which will make
that evil unlawful and are they not shouting
With lOV when hoiiih uenernl Mtuiemlilv mmntD u
statute to cover it V if there is a weakness ill
the church organization of today, that weakness
springs from the fact that too many of the
followers of the ^azarene are more interested
in some particular phase of evil in civil life
than they are in proclaiming the original sin
'of mankind and its only sure remedy?an undoubting,
unqualified and everlasting hold upon
the Gospel of the Galilean.
Murder may meet with retribution at the
hands of the State but homicide ends when the
murderer begins to love his brother-man. And
it is only the Qospel proclaiming the brotherhood
of mankind which can teach a man that
there are more ways of committing murder
than by pistol, bludgeon and poison. The manufacturer
who stands a woman twelve hours a
day for six days in the week in an unsanitary
workshop cannot be convinced by the law of
the land that he is murderous. If you will
properly regenerate him, he will know it.
PRACTICAL DEMONSTRATION.
upon me otner nana, it is to be said to the
glory of the present-day church organization,
that never has there been so practical a demonstration
of the kindly thoughts and kindly
deeds of the Saviour of mankind as at the present
time. Men contribute to hospitals, to asylums,
to charities of every kind, and the spirit
of the Master as a mere sentiment is abroad
in the land. The world is filled full of good
works and good workers; of men and women
who want things to be right; who are striving
to have right things; but no man can go
through life successfully upon a mere emotion.
He is foolish who thinks to minister to a soul
diseased by some sporadic deed of goodness.
I do not care how much the prominent member
of the church may give to missions and to
charities; if I am convinced that he got the
money from the blood and sweat and toil of his
weak brothers and sisters or if he made it by
transgressions, legal under the law of the land
but unmoral under the law of God, he is not a
Christian. Such men would better cease trying
to bribe God by good works; they would
much better seek His forgiveness and Cacchaeus-like,
try to straighten the past." 1 would
not have the church go back to the stern, as
D U T h f February 26, 1913
cetic, controversial days. 1 would have no time
wasted in determining whether Hell is a place
or a condition. With due deference to my fel
low-Calvinists, I would waste no time in trying
to find out whether the Greek particle "en"
meant "to" or "into." ;
THE CHUKCH.
The church, itself, has failed to impress upon
the individual man the great and vital
necessity for the church. To my mind, the
church is God's divinely appointed place where
a thoughtful man at any stage of his life, aitting
down like a bookkeeper and opening a
debit and credit account with himself of all his
thoughts and words and deeds, of all his acts
omitted and committed, will inevitably find
himself a bankrupt; where, if it be left with
himself to judge himself in the forum ot his
own conscience, he will be compelled to convict
and sentence himself. This sacred place
was created that man having reached a conclusion
as to his condition may find an avenue
of escape. And once he knows something
about what the church stands for, the opportunities
for escape are measurably increased.
It is also a divinely appointed place where a
man, after the hard and bitter contests of life,
with their siekening and sinful experiences,
may return as unto a hospital and have wine
i ~:i a^ i- J_ m
uliu. uu puurea miu uis wounus.
No one will ever be able to convince me that
the church is not a divinely appointed organization
upon earth; that it is not a hospital
wherein men and women are to be reborn, not
once, but at least once a week and soon, I hope,
once each day; reborn to a knowledge of their
need of dependency and reliance upon a higher
power; reborn to a faith that if they will
grip the Unseen, the Eternal, and trust it in
every hour of sunshine and in every moment of
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ucopauj tuat uut uy mi^ut auu uy puwcr, uut
by the Spirit of the Living God, out of weakness
shall come strength and out of evil shall
arise good, and that some time, somewhere,
somehow, the new-born soul stripped of the
sins of life, shall rise in a newer and a brighter
life in the perfection of beauty and of holiness.
AN ENDURING INFLUENCE.
Editor of the Presbyterian of the South:
The interesting "Story of John Wyckliflfe"
in the United Presbyterian, which you repub
lished in your paper of January 8th, recounts
that according to tradition the adhes of the great
reformer, whose body had by a decree of the
Council of Constance been dug up and burned
forty years after his death, were thrown into a
brook flowing near the parsonage of Lutterworth,
and that commenting on this act of
sacrilege, Fuller says: "This brook did convey
his ashes into the Avon, Avon into Severn,
Severn into the narrow sea, and that into the
wide ocean. And so the ashes of Wyckliffe are
the emblems of his doctrines which are now
dispersed the world over."
Some one, I do not now remember who, put
this beautiful thought into the following verse:
The Avon to the Severn runs,
The Severn to the sea;
And Wyckliffe's fame is spread abroad
Wide as the waters be.
This simple but exquisite verse testifies that
the memory of the "Morning Star of the Reformation,"
and the beneficent influence of his
great work of translating the Bible into English,
have survived through the long centuries .
during which his calumniators have mouldered
in forgotten graves.
L. S. Marye.
b Oharlottesville, Va., February 10th, 1913.